my life to live

love me a flowchart

Loved it

(On another note, I’ll be seeing Jennifer Egan, and a few other authors, speak this fall at the Philadelphia Public Library.  Woohoo!)

I was thinking about this book for some reason today.  I read it in college.  I found it to be a surprising sort of page-turner—surprising in that it’s doesn’t exactly have a suspenseful, action-packed plot to propel you through its pages.  Rather, I found its central characters oddly endearing.  I wanted to know what happened to them, and I kept reading out of the same impulse that might lead you to, say, Facebook stalk that intriguing friend-of-a-friend who came to visit one weekend.  The same impulse that explains why you still have that one friend’s number in your cell phone, even though you haven’t spoken to them since college and they probably don’t even have that number anymore.  

The other reason I kept reading the book was because I think it helped me understand a little bit of my heritage.  My family has scarcely been in this country for a century; my great-grandparents, like so many other Russian Jews, fled the Pale of Settlement in 1912 for what I’m assuming would have been a more welcoming environment.  As a child, all I knew of their way of life was piecemeal—we had their samovar sitting on our coffee table, some stories from my grandfather, and some sepia-toned photos of dour-faced, swarthy individuals looking as Old World as can be in their dark, draped clothing.  I used to take in these items and look at my grandfather, who loved watching game shows and drinking Seagram’s, and my father, who could not have been more Midwestern white-bread middle-class, and wonder—when did it stop being important?  In that I mean, at what point along the way did all that heritage get left behind?  Being Jewish was clearly something so dear to the identity of my great-grandparents that it must have partially inspired them to pack up and move halfway across the world; cut to a only few decades later, and my father can speak barely a lick of Hebrew/Yiddish/Russian.  We assume we may have relatives in Russia somewhere, but we don’t even know from which town our ancestors left.   

Maybe this is something which will mark a generational divide—this inability to grasp the concept of certain important pieces of information being lost to time and not being automatically archived for later use in some data cloud.  Either way, I’ve always been fascinated by the assimilation process, and I think this book maybe helped me visualize how that unfolds over time. 

Three passages from childhood favorite Jane Eyre are branded in my memory.  The first is the one, where Jane hears Rochester’s voice calling to her across the moors, I still think is one of the most gorgeous and eerie scenes I’ve ever read.  The second is the below quote:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

which really resonated with me when I was thirteen.  If my memory serves me correctly, I may have even copied part of this in silver paint pen onto my Trapper Keeper.  I clearly recall reading this part for the first time and being like, YES, Charlotte Bronte, you really get it gurl.  Or something along those lines.  Little did my young self know that not only was there a plethora of feminist writing out there in the world, but that I would get to read scads of it in college.  

Anyway, Jane Eyre’s significance in my life was mostly to awaken those feminist leanings, so I will be forever indebted to the book, which was one of the largest novels I’d ever devoured at that point.  But I always liked how it was a little spooky and mystical and wild, despite being told through the eyes of a relatively rational, self-possessed, and principled young woman.  (I should add here that I have always liked to think of Charlotte Bronte as the more traditional, overachieving elder sister and Emily as the weird, kooky middle child—the Marcia and Jan Brady of 19th century British literature, if you will.)  That’s why I love this latest film adaptation, which you should go see now, so very much; like the 2004 Pride and Prejudice, it may skim over a lot of plot and exposition, but it gets the spirit of the source material so very right, and will hopefully make the book accessible to another generation.  At any rate, there was a huge line for the matinee showing this past Sunday at my local art house theater, so perhaps there was never a need to revamp the story for a younger audience.  

I would leave you with the third passage that has always stuck with me, but it would be a major spoiler for those who have never read the book—it’s the ending sequence, which outlines an institution which is still frequently misunderstood.  If only more people read Jane Eyre, maybe they’d have fewer illusions about what that institution should be!

zachklein:

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.

This was totally on the cover of one of my Norton Anthologies from college  

Well, this book just blew me away.  Now I want to read the second one.  

Sometimes I separate contemporary writers into two categories.  You have the ones who make it appear effortless and who make you think that perhaps writing, and writing well, is something achievable.  I put people like Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and J.D. Salinger in this box.   Of course, you could try to emulate Hemingway/Didion/Salinger/et. al. all day long and never come up with anything approaching their level, but you still try.  

Then you have folks like A.S. Byatt—and yes, Margaret Atwood—whose novels are just these incredibly well-realized, painstakingly crafted texts, and you just can’t help but think of all the hours and sleepless nights spent poring over such things that it’s just exhausting to think about, but a pleasure to marvel over.  It’s not always a matter of minimalism vs. maximalism—I would put Cormac McCarthy in this category as well, for his almost supernatural flair for diction.  If you have literary aspirations at all, these are the writers whose books just leave you with a major inferiority complex.  

Anyway, the novel.  I feel like I’ve read quite a few apocalyptic/dystopian sci fi/speculative fiction in the past year or two.  Just noting.  I think the themes in this one were more resonant than most, but perhaps that’s just because it’s more current.  I think one criticism I would have of the novel is that I did find the character of Oryx to be disappointing and unrealistic—straight up Manic Pixie Dream Girl/Hooker With a Heart of Gold territory, which would be expected out of male writer but a HUGE letdown from a female writer, who should know better!  But perhaps this was intentional—Atwood has more than enough I Know How to Write Females points from The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye, and this one was written from a male point of view, so…

Anyway, have any of you read this?  What did you think?  What about the sequel—is it worth it?  

How To Teach Reading:

The novel is a tapestry; the author a master weaver.  They work out the pattern in their head before laying down the threads that eventually take shape to become the image realized in their mind’s eye.  Maybe sometimes it doesn’t work, and they have to unpick all the threads and start over.  Maybe sometimes they impulsively embroider other flourishes atop the groundwork they have already laid.  

You, the teacher, you unravel it all for your student.  You find the spots where the threads are loosely, and gently tug and tug until finally it all comes apart.  Here is one theme, in metallic-shot silk fiber; here is a motif, in crimson sateen.  You trace these threads with your eagle eyes throughout the image, searching for other spots you can worry at until the strand’s entire length is exposed and shining for your students to see.  

And once you have taken apart the author’s handiwork, the threads hold old truths—lessons and omens from the ongoing saga of humanity which is constantly changing yet always the same.  Like a genome, each fiber unfurls to reveal secrets about ourselves and those who came before us—secrets that we have known all along, secrets woven by those pen-wielding Fates.  

And that’s how you teach reading, really.